A chill has come into the air at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. Seasonal gold suddenly streaks the leaves, and a sharpened wind rattles the bamboo, and all around the panda house, people are talking about the emptiness that’s about to descend.
The giant pandas will be flown off to China by early December. The cub known as “little miracle” — born here during the pandemic to a panda that was thought to be too old to get pregnant — was always destined to join China’s breeding program. But China is taking his parents back, too, which is a cruel blow for the giant pandas’ many adoring fans.
There is a particular melancholy in watching the harmless adoration of bulbous bears seemingly caught in the geopolitical machinations of superpowers.
“I will be crying,” said Helen Gonzales, a 77-year-old who described herself as a “retired policy wonk” and who strolled around the pandas’ habitat this week in dangling panda earrings. She is among the bears’ dedicated local fans; over the years she has helped organize fund-raisers for giant panda preservation and whiled away so much time peering into their enclosures that she’s gotten to recognize the animals’ various personalities and struck up acquaintances with their keepers. “It’s going to be heartbreaking,” she said grimly.
The bears have lived in the National Zoo under a carefully negotiated agreement with the Chinese government, which maintains ownership of the world giant panda population. And for reasons unknown, China has not renewed the deal.
The government in Beijing has long practiced panda diplomacy, lending the bears to (or withholding them from) zoos in a reflection of favor or annoyance. (Some old pandas, and their offspring, survive from the days when China presented the bears as gifts, not loans.) The presentation of pandas, for example, has often coincided with trade deals favorable to Beijing. American panda lovers may now be suffering the side effects of a frostiness that has crept into U.S.-Chinese relations. When it comes to pandas, China giveth — and, now, China taketh away.
Trying to put a bright face on things, the zoo is now hosting a long goodbye cheerfully called Panda Palooza. There are panda-themed refreshments, musical performances and art exhibitions, all geared to give people a chance to bid a formal farewell to the pandas. As for the bears themselves, they’re doing what the great globular creatures always do — lumbering, chawing implacably at stalks of bamboo, napping midswoon over the rocks. I spotted the cub, everyone’s favorite, licking honey off a spindle toy, hunching jealously so the crowds were left to gaze at his dirty haunches.
The festival bears the fingerprints of power and politics. Snacks and calligraphy lessons are proffered by the Chinese Embassy, where diplomats clash with the United States over everything from intellectual property to Taiwan to Covid.
Showy corporate sponsorship (logo emblazoned on the panda viewing station and online programs) came courtesy of Boeing, the U.S. airplane manufacturer eager to ingratiate its way out of its own ongoing chill in China. Boeing’s China troubles worsened in 2019, when the government in Beijing grounded the 737 Max after two deadly crashes. Boeing has struggled to regain sales in China, notwithstanding the company’s insistence that it remains “very bullish” about selling commercial planes to Chinese airlines.
China’s control of the global panda supply is often cast in tones of snark or with dismay at the notion that a government can exert ownership over an entire animal species. These grumblings strike me as a dead end, though. Giant pandas, a delicate species whose numbers dwindled close to extinction, might not exist anymore without the interventions of the Chinese.
The series of giant pandas that have made their home here became the zoo’s stars and spiritual centers after Pat Nixon, visiting China as first lady with her husband in 1972, cooed over dinner about the cuteness of pandas (as one does). A few weeks later, the first pair arrived.
Ever since, all through the bumps and embraces of the U.S.-Chinese frenemy-ship, the panda exhibit has been home to a succession of pandas. It’s hard to even imagine the zoo without them. Their likenesses are everywhere, staring down from posters, depicted in statues, name checked at Panda Plaza and Panda Overlook Cafe.
Now things could be different. China appears to be souring on U.S. zoos. A loan agreement with the San Diego Zoo ended amid trade tensions in 2019, and the California bears were duly shipped back to China. They haven’t been replaced.
This year, Ya Ya the giant panda was removed from the Memphis Zoo and flown back to Shanghai after a loan agreement ended. She departed amid outcry from animal activists and Chinese netizens who accused the zoo of mistreating her. Both the zoo and the Chinese government vigorously denied the allegations, explaining that Ya Ya’s fur sometimes looked patchy because of a skin condition. But this did not cool nationalistic sentiment in China, where people petitioned and lobbied for Ya Ya’s return.
Now there are just seven pandas on U.S. soil: three in Washington and four at Zoo Atlanta. Two cubs in Atlanta are expected to depart early next year, leaving only their parents under a deal that is set to expire later in 2024.
In the halls of the panda house I met Judy Tong, an optometry professor who lives in California but has undertaken seven panda pilgrimages to D.C. since 2021.
Ms. Tong’s fondness for the pandas is wrapped up in the figure of Xiao Qi Ji, the male cub born in 2020. She told me that when the zoo was trying to decide on his name, she had a dream in which the newborn panda appeared before her, and she found herself saying, “He’s a little miracle.” That, she insists, was before the zoo settled on the cub’s name, which means “little miracle” in English.
I asked Ms. Tong what drew her to pandas, and she talked about survival. Pandas have been brought back from the edge of extinction with extreme human intervention, she pointed out. Bamboo forests they need to survive are threatened. Pandas are solitary creatures with astoundingly improbable reproductive odds: Females have, at most, a 72-hour window each year to get pregnant.
In the panda’s biological travails, Ms. Tong said, she perceives an inspiring story of spiritual triumph against adversity.
“They fight for their existence,” she said. “Within ourselves, we also fight.”
Seeing the pandas go, Ms. Tong said, was crushing.
“I’m heartbroken,” she said. “It really hurt my heart.”
